Where Rules Break

She kills it everyday. I swear I’ve seen her wrap it in a black trash bag, tie it up, select then heaviest stones, and throw it off a pier. It struggles and writhes, and somehow emerges, bloody wings, unalterable hope. Her faithfulness is not whacked so easily. Tenacity, an unrelinquishing, some real moxie. She looks for signs that his is dormant, not dead: an unexpected text message, his tears and snot still staining the shoulder of her winter coat, the hard goodbyes and drinking, his loneliness. I want to tell her, out of my own fight with moxie: sometimes the traffic light is green because its broken, and you go and crash and never see the terror in the other driver’s eyes; sometimes patterns are arbitrary -It wasn’t really his face in the cloud – fate is a patient behind a barred window, folding and refolding a map until the disconnecting and reconnecting routes seem divine in their strangeness, and some punk kid has stolen the street signs, or maybe there never were sings. ************** My friend, eating raisins, looked down at his hand where the second portion was poured (The first was gone, he said, swimming around in my stomach juice) and saw maggots crawling in the shriveled dead fruit. It’s not always an apple. And don’t that just beat all? Beat it to a bloody pulp until there’s nothing left of a symbol on which we’ve relied? Where language splinters we look to image, where image cracks we’re left with action and here you might say a chicken with it’s head cut off but I cut a chicken’s head off once. It didn’t run. it flapped its broken wings, as if in flight, and made sad shapes in the dirt.